I have a requirement to do 3rd party age verification before I ship an order. I'm using a company called EVS for this. They released a shopify app recently, but seems partly baked. It requires a user to enter date of birth when registering for an account and then triggers the verification when the user places an order. The main problem with that is that it's rare for a customer to actually create an account before ordering for the first time -- instead they order first, then shopify emails them to create an account after the fact. Creating the account afterward does not allow the customer to enter DOB.
So I'm planning to implement my own solution. I can use EVS's API to run the verification by sending a combination of Name, Address, DOB, DL# and State, and last 4 of SSN. I have already built a proprietary order management system that pulls in customer and order data, and I can write a client to perform the verification.
I'm less savvy on the shopify side. I need to balance customer friction when placing an order for the first time, against having to do a lot of manual work for verification.
Below are the options I have conceived. Are there any other options? Any ideas for a better solution? Keep in mind I need to verify a customer once. I can tag the customer account as verified, and once verified it's business as usual.
Alter shopify templates to only show the checkout button when a user is logged in. If not logged in, show a "Create an account" button instead. That way the user provides DOB during account creation and the EVS app works as designed.
Set up a separate verification site like verify.my-domain.com. I can trigger an email to the customer upon order creation and ask them to verify. (May have issues with incorrect email addresses or spam filtering.)
If customer is not logged in, or account is not age verified, and they click Checkout, I can redirect them to a page. I can use a form on the page to do the verification. If verification passes, send them on to checkout.
For option 3, I don't know what shopify allows or what best practices allow. Can I use js to pass data to my own server on a different subdomain? Or post the form to another subdomain and then redirect back to shopify?
I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.
You have pretty much summed up all your options, to clarify on them a little:
You can require that customers create an account in the store checkout settings. /admin/settings/checkout
This would work, you could iframe it in too on a custom Page. Or, better, use cross-domain calls or jsonp.
This is a little convoluted and you would have to persist and maintain lot of external state. I'd avoid this
I think a combination of 1 and 2. Turn on "require customer account". Modify the customer account creation page. Implement a cross domain policy with your server which will host custom code leveraging the EVS API.
I'm not sure if you are selling tangible goods or not but with stringent policies on users' age you have to bear in mind that shipping addresses could change. For a tight integration you should look at having webhooks whenever a customer is changed and make sure all their data is still valid since their last EVS approval.
I've been looking into this quite extensively and we've spent a number of hours experimenting with options. Our client in this case is on Shopify Plus so we do have the benefit of access to checkout.liquid.
Our research has led us to believe that one cannot pass the required 'customer note' of the date of birth to the checkout should they be attempting to checkout as a 'guest'. Perhaps because the 'customer' does not yet exist.
Our options have been narrowed down to:
Write a custom backend app that allows Shopify and EVS to communicate directly (XML API on the EVS side) in the checkout process or just prior and then pass the verification status back to Shopify to allow the order to proceed, or append some relevant status marker for the fulfillment department to act accordingly. The EVS app doesn't prevent the order from proceeding, but does flag the customer's age as unverified in the Risk Level panel in the admin. This would be quite a substantial project and by no means low hanging fruit. There is also risk of re-doing a lot of what the EVS app does already and running into they same obstacles they did.
Force customers to register prior to checkout (if not signed in). This seems the most viable approach. The only caveat being that existing customers will not have the customer note (birth date) and we'd need to build a smaller backend app to allow them to append this to their customer account via the Shopify API (this cannot be done via liquid).
These are our findings and I'd love to know more about how you ended up approaching this.
Related
So I am building an app with react-native (expo) where a user fixes appointment with some other person and to do so, he has pay the other person.
Now how can I handle payments here. What i want is the user makes the payment and the receiver should be the other person but how much i understood the payment gateways, the payment is received by the app owner or in simple words, receiver is a single person.
I also tried deep linking to directly take the user to some UPI app like google pay or paytm but it seems that those apps require some special type of account (merchant account) to make the transaction if we access them using deep links (which is a problem as it is not necessary that every user will have a merchant account).
As I said, it is always better that you have your own payment gateway account, and all the transaction goes through your gateway, meaning you get the money and you build a system which will forward the payment to the receiver. I have worked on 2 such apps:
1: Where we have our own razorpay account, and we get the payment first, and then we forward it.
2: Where in we were directly having transaction between 2 users, but not through app, instead we display them the account details of the receiver and give them 48hrs time to pay that account. But we had to manually handle this scenario since one cannot know if the user has paid to the said account, since it's not your account.
3: There is one more method where in payment gateway has a webhook which consists of a virtual account number, and every user that lands on your app, you can create a virtual account number for him/her and store the user-virtual account number relationship in your db, whenever there is a payment, you can find out about the user through this virtual account number. Read about this.
The deep link is a good idea, but again, as you mentioned, it will require the end user to be a merchant user(have a merchant account), you can find more details here
Maybe you can ask your users to create a merchant account, which again I am not sure if it's possible, and if it's possible, if it's feasible?
The best way according to me is, you handle this through your payment gateway, and instantly forward it to the user who should have received it. Again there are some rules and clause to it(some commission is taken by those payment gateway,etc), check those things out.
I think the most close answer to my question is to use razorpay routes where we can link multiple accounts with our account and transfer money accordingly.
More details here
The company I am working at offers a web based calculation tool which has to be paid monthly (a fixed price for a license).
Normally, users go to our website and authenticate themselves with their credentials and then can use the application. When they cancel their subscription they are not able to use the tool anymore, obviously.
Now another company called us because they want to provide our application for their own clients. We have already fixed that they have to pay a license fee for every of their clients. But there is also a restriction: their users should not have to log in on any of our websites (only on the website of our client). But the web application is hosted on our server and is loaded as an iframe.
Now there is that problem that we are not sure whether our client tells us the correct number of people who use our application wherefore we would like to verify that in some way.
One of my ideas is the following:
Our client has to call an API for every users who would like to use our application in order to submit some information like name or an unique ID of that user
When the user would like to access our application, an ID parameter is appended to the iFrame URL
I think that this is not a very good solution because our client could use the same ID for every access and pretend that only one users uses the application. By saving the ip address and id of the accesses it is possible to determine fraud in some cases because ip address will not change frequently.
We even do not have to know WHICH user accesses the application but only the NUMBER of users per month.
I am interested if there is a cryptographic solution where it is hard to cheat. Something like an authentication method which does not require any interaction of the user.
Well you can't. You should require the partner to issue a token for each user so you know they came from the partner.
You could have the partner call an api you expose to issue a one time token for a user and specify user id and IP. You could alternatively have the partner digitally sign such a login request.
If you bill the partner per user, and the partner decitfull he could claim less users.
You can fingerprint the users, you can give long term coockies, you can check IP and fonts installed etc. These will allow you to detect most types of fraud.
If you give a declared userId a cookie and then see him again without it, you assign him a new cookie and then later see the first cookie again while the partner is always declaring same id that is a very strong indicator of fraud.
If I was the decietfull partner I would pair up geographicly close users and merge their IDs. it would look no different from a user with two devices. But this still limits the extent of fraud possible. Two devices per user is plausible. 10 less so.
Find business partners you trust.
I'm using Paypal rest api to make payment
the workflow is:
Create payment
Redirect to approval Url
User approved (return back to my site)
Execute payment
But there's one thing that I don't want users re-filling shipping address again because it was filled in my website.
So I change the workflow to:
Create web profile (set no shipping field)
Get web profile ID
Create payment with experienceProfileId given
Redirect to approval Url
User approved (return back to my site)
Execute payment
But I found this will create a lots WebProfile every time user request payment.
I think it is crazy to do:
create and delete it later again and again
attempt listing WebProfiles and check which is the one I want to use every time while creating payment
store experienceProfileId as a constant
What is the best practice for handling WebProfile or does there any solution just hiding shipping address while user approving payments?
Maybe this is not the answer regarding this "WebProfile". As a fact, I dont know what exactly "WebProfile" does or is.
I worked on the same Workflow these days. As you wrote I needed to predefine some address. For me it was obvious, that I have to do the database-stuff on my Website. Then I exactly define the order, shipping_address, etc. and send the users to Paypal.
If you predefine the new ShippingAddress() to your ´new ItemList()´ by
$itemlist->setShippingAddress($shippingaddress) the user cannot change it within the Process.
http://i.imgur.com/nAg8jxU.png
Maybe this helps you a little.
I am developing an application where I have a section only for paid users where they purchase for the section using the in-app purhcase system in iOS. I know that I need to keep track of the purchase history myself, and this is where the problem begins. I have a database and I am capable of storing users in my database, with a web service interface. How can I create a system where a URL is pinged only when a user has made the purchase.
As an example, I have the URL:
http://example.com/registerUserPremium/userid=123456
How can I get this to be called only when a purchase is made? The most elegant way seems like Apple pinging the URL with a special user ID upon purchase, but I can't find a way of doing it. It is obviously not a solution to make the user call that URL within the app, as it can be cracked/pirated. What is a good way of providing such a mechanism that is piracy-proof. My service is web-based, so if I can get this part done, the rest relies on my server-side mechanism (the user will just send a special key that is stored in its keychain, to the server) so I'll be able to finish the project. In short, I need a way to call a URL only when a purchase is made. What are some possible solutions?
Thanks,
Can.
I see two solutions:
"Server product model" (doc): the appstore contact your servers every time a user makes a purchase. In this case you have all of the information right away.
"Builtin product model" (same doc) in which the application gets the receipt from the appstore. In this latter case you can contact your server special URL, providing the receipt information, and the server can verify that the receipt has not been tampered with asking the app store to verify (it's a simple post, see here).
I am in the midst of trying to find an e-commerce solution for my employer, and it is necessary that we go with a hosted payment page to minimize our PCI compliance woes. After researching several companies' solutions, it seems that they all expect you to submit the total price of the transaction to them via a hidden field or GET variables in order to generate the payment form. This seems like a sizable concern for the merchant, since a user with Firebug (or eyes, in the case of GET variables) could easily modify the transaction total, get a new hosted payment form, and continue with the checkout, thus giving themselves whatever discount they desire.
Has anyone set up a hosted payment page before and dealt with this issue? Any suggestions for a better way to do things?
There usually is a hash submitted with those forms that are generated with secret values that the user won't know (e.g. password, transaction key, etc). So if they tamper with the amount, which is also used in calculating the hash's value, then the payment gateway will reject the transaction. The user cannot bypass this by changing the hash because they do not have all of the information required to calculate it.
So using these hosted forms are safe from abuse. If they weren't they wouldn't be viable products and the gateways couldn't offer them for use.